Alison Mills Newman

Alison Mills Newman is a writer, chaplain, and former actress.^[1] Her 1974 autofictional novel Francisco, a chronicle of Black bohemian life in San Francisco, was reissued in 2023 to acclaim.^[2] She was the first African-American teenage actress on a television series, playing Carol Deering in the sitcom Julia.^[3]

Mills Newman has said she decided to be an actress when she was twelve years old, and participated in theater projects with Maya Angelou under the direction of Frank Silvera.^[3] She left Hollywood in her twenties, focusing on poetry and music.^[1] She sang and performed alongside jazz musicians Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry, Weather Report, and Taj Mahal. Newman wrote Francisco on roadtrips with her future husband, Francisco Toscano Newman.^[4]

Francisco was rediscovered when Jeffrey Yang, an editor at New Directions, heard of the book in an article by Henryette Mullen but was unable to find a copy. The first and only edition had been printed 50 years ago from a small independent press in Berkeley.^[5] He contacted Mills Newman, and she emailed him a photocopy of the text in March 2021. "I was really floored," Yang said.^[1] The book was reissued by New Directions in 2023.

In the forward for Francisco, Saidiya Hartman calls the novel "a portrait of the artist as a young Black woman." Stephen Kearse, writing for The Nation, wrote that "Francisco is a novel that is very much of the Black arts Movement."^[4]